Further to
Issue #53, Section #2
(24 Oct 2002: GNUe support for Oracle 9i)
,
it was noted that GNUe looked for a particular Oracle listener, using the
service name from connections.conf. Oracle's own SQL*Plus tools looked
for the default listener. This was with running both SQL*Plus and GNUe
on the same machine as the database server. Jason Cater (jcater)
explained
"when running on the server, sqlplus
can use interprocess communications to talk with the server - we can't
- we can only do it via tcp/ip"
. This had never been an issue
for him, as
"I am running Oracle in client/server
- nothing but oracle runs on the server"
. This meant that the
connections information was taken from the TNSNAMES.ORA file as
well as listener.ora. There should be no problem running GNUe and
the Oracle database on the same machine, but
"you'll still need a listener running though
: :)"
. He volunteered to send his Oracle configuration
files to help. The problem turned out to be that the name of the
service was different to the (SERVICE=) entry in the
tnsnames.ora file, which was concerning, as this file had been
automatically generated by the Oracle tools, so therefore should
not have gone wrong. It was asked if there was any way to
verify the file. Jason said
"I don't know
- I had a hard time setting mine up the first time - when I finally
got a working version several years ago - I never touched it
again"
.

Further to
Issue #53, Section #26
(27 Oct 2002: GNUe small business packages)
,
Jason Cater (jcater) said that savannah hackers had queried his
project submissions, asking for an
"URL to
the source code tarball"
. Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said this
was
"just to check licensing"
.
Jason said
"I am creating new projects, though
- how can they check licensing for something I'm going to do?"
.
Andrew said
"you said for RentFree that
you had source, they'll check that the files have the proper copyright
into"
. Jason said
"I already indicated
that it was gpl"
. Andrew replied
"as
do a lot of people - but people seem to have a knack for missing copyright
headers on source files. Projects that i've submitted have been rejected
& told to resubmit, too. Do you have any code/forms/stuff for
gnue-sb?"
If not, he would need to explain that to them.
Derek Neighbors (revDeke) noted that GNUe seemed to be the only GNU project
that was consciencious in getting copyright assignments from contributors,
so it was a bit galling that
"they are worried
one of our SUB PROJECTS might not have good license?"
Jason said
he did not mind so much that they needed clarification on something, but
was surprised that it had taken two days to get back to him on it.
Andrew said
"if you saw the pile of projects
that are in the submission queue..."
.

The next day, Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) noted that Jason's
submissions were being discussed on the savannah-hackers
mailing list. He reminded Jason that he would have
"to resubmit, which means using the
URL provided - this is because once they have been declined for
whatever reason, the system is designed for you to have to
resubmit :)"
Jason was not very impressed with this -
"no history information? bah"
.
Andrew said that savannah had been forked from the last
public version of sourceforge, so shared many of its
limitations. Jason said the free software way was to
"hack it to be better"
.

Jason was also confused, as
"They
asked me if I wanted to be a part of the GNU project on the
registration screen"
, which he had replied yes to.
They were now asking for proof of this, but the question
had been whether he wanted to be, not whether he already
was. Andrew said
"i told them that
GNUe subprojects should be considered part of GNUe (as if my
opinion matters ;)"
.

Jason also raised the issue of how he should mark the
code as being under the GPL (GNU General Public License) -
"I have a COPYING file - however -
All the "code" is really GFD files - is it going to come back to
bite me that there's not copyright headers in the GFD files?
or is the COPYING file enough"
? Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch)
said
"the COPYING file states that
you should have headers in each source"
code file.
Jason said the
"thing is, the GFD files
are automatically generated"
by Designer -
"so keeping a header in there will be a
biotch"
. Andrew suggested
"perhaps go the nasty way & have
a license tag for forms - so that designer can generate copyright
header in xml comments"
.

Derek Neighbors (derek) said he thought that
"the gfds should have the copyright
header - its not MANDATORY - the COPYING file is enough - but it
is better to have in GFDs"
as well. Jason said he would
put them in manually for now. Derek said the long-term solution
was
"in designer allow a 'preferences'
that lets you put in custom headers - and wehn you make gfd's
you can choose from those"
. Jason said
"I think once I get "projects" working in
Designer this will be the appropriate place for that -
as on the "project" config screen, you could say "place xxxx
copyright header in all G?D files""
. Derek said this
"is GREAT for two reasons -
a. you dont have to manually fight designer -
b. it will add headers so you dont forget :) - /me is VERY
guilty of b"
. Jason felt it should not be
"a system-wide preference - as I work
on all kinds of projects w/gnue - public, gpl'd projects -
internal projects"
and so on. Derek said
"i would do a 'profiles' thing
and then be able to set it by project - i.e. you could have a
GPL profile, BSD, company foo etc"
.

The next day,
Derek noted that the project page for GNUe Small Business was
now on savannah -
"i have code to
actually already check into cvs - just getting cvs ready -
hopefully by monday it will be 'official' - and you can checkout
code and everything for contacts and product management"
.
He explained
"its a SUB project of
GNUe - the 'official' gnue applications will be made using the
appserver and will be much more intensive - the 'small business'
applications are 'official', but more a side addition - they will
be released much sooner but will not use appserver"
.

Derek also noted
"we are starting
the legal battles to get fedex and ups api for shipping management
as free software - but regardless of how we release it that is
being worked on as well - sales order, invoicing, shipping
management, contact management, inventory/product management
should be within next 30 - 60 days"
. Charles Rouzer
(Mr_You) asked
"how are other free
solutions connecting to UPS/Fex?"
Derek replied
"they arent or they are doing so
illegally - the way it looks right now (at least for fedex) is
that if you write a solution you can not distribute it - whether
its 'free software' or 'propreitary' software"
. He said
"we have some issues to resolve legally
- we are going by the letter of the fedex contract (not us, but
real lawyers reviewing) - we will likely try to communicate with
them to get written consent to develop free software using the
api's in some form or another - as the other alternative is to
'reverse engineer' and play samba like api madness - which we
certainly could do if necessary"
. He was not tempted to
just
"download the api and write
something and distribute under gpl"
as
"if fedex found out and got pissed
off, they could kill the project dead"
. The worst case
scenario was that the shipping management would have to be
done as proprietary software
"that
interfaces with gnue"
but
"we
would MUCH rather it be free software"
.

Derek said that the 'code' for GNUe Small Business was
"pretty much all schema's and xml
files - which is what is great - entire applications beeing xml
and db schema. Actually i think in the product management stuff
for right now i only have 1 trigger :) - and that is to over come
an oddity in my ui refreshing :)"
to refresh a list of
foreign keys for a dropdown, as discussed in
Issue #53, Section #11
(24 Oct 2002: Updating drop-down lists and changeable runtime parameters)
.

The next day, Derek cut and pasted his initial CVS check-in
for GNUe Small Business. Nicholas Lee (esands) noted the
GNUe Schema Definition (.gsd) files in the check-in and
asked
"I assume designer reads gsd
files and outputs sql?"
Derek said
"kind of"
-
"gsd is an xml file -
currently you use xslt and an xsl (style sheet) -
and it makes a sql file."
At the moment, he did this
from the command line, but it was intended that Designer
should do this directly in the future, and it might do
so already. He noted the code for the XSLT was
"all in gnue-common iirc"
-
"gnue/common/utils/xml2sql/ i
think has the stylesheets"
. Nicholas asked
"what deb is PySablot?"
.
Derek said that the pysablot
"debs
arent in sid yet :( - working on it - they are on our
website
though :)"
. He warned that the .gsd-handling code
in CVS was temporarily broken as of time of writing, which
Nicholas confirmed - Derek was using a slightly older copy
that still worked, as
"i have
real world deadlines and others have needs that are watiing
on us - so expect gnue-sb to move at fairly steady pace
compared to how gnue apps have gone in the past"
.

Neil Tiffin (neilt) said he wanted
"to
build business objects - and as long as we have a agreed aproach that
works"
, he was
"happy to see the work
progressing"
- . Reinhard noted
"we
have finally agreed on storing the class definitions in the database - or
to be more precise in "system business objects""
.
Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) noted
"well I
have a parser commited for ODL that uses PLY in case no one noticed,
but I need to make it parse into something like perhaps an AST"
.
Reinhard confirmed this had been discussed,
"as well as about comparable things that
only exist more or less as an idea - and we agreed that it is a good
thing to have parsers for other formats - that can read "external"
defined objects and "merge" that into the "main" repository as a
separate command line tool"
. Neil felt
"the back end for storing business objects
should be plugable just in case we want to change it"
.
Reinhard agreed -
"that's why made it a
separate "module""
.

Daniel said
"I figured using an xml
markup as an exchange format between designer and appserver would be
nice too - since designer probably wants xml"
. He pointed out
that
"it is supposed to be our IDE isn't
it? jcater made it so you could write plugins"
. Reinhard
suggested
"we could even have some
"normal" form that accesses these metaobjects"
.

Neil asked
"can business objects be
aggregates of other business objects?"
- for example,
"so the GUI can just request the sale
order and get all the header and items on the sales order"
at once. Reinhard suggested this might not be a good idea, as
"the sales order might have 1000
items on it - and the gui doesn't want to load all 1000 at
once"
. Neil said he was used to business objects
corresponding with a form -
"this
business object can be a real object or a proxy object for
several real business objects - but this means that some of the
complexity of the GUI is moved to the business object"
.
Reinhard felt
"that the appserver
shouldn't deal with visualisation of data"
-
"if we define those "form-bound"
business objects - we move parts of the form definitions into
appserver"
. Neil agreed about visualisation, but said
"if we dont"
have compound
business objects
"we move linking all
of the data to the form"
- if links
"also have to be defined by the form
so the work to maintain it will be double"
.
"The forms or appserver will be fragile
to breaking if one is changed but not the other"
.

Reinhard felt
"we will always
have this issue as long as form definitions (XML) and object
definitions (database) are maintained seperately -
that a form definition doesn't match the underlying
object"
. Neil said that compound business objects
should actually help with this, as the compound object could
be changed to pick up a property from a different child
business object, but still present it as the same field to
the form. Reinhard understood this, but did not see
"how this could
work with 1:n instead of 1:1"
. Neil admitted
"thats is the downside -
in that you hide the relationships in the proxy objects
and the forms just deal with data - but the upside is that i
can add a complex stored procedures to retreive data into and
object and the form does not need to know the relationship -
only that it should display the data"
. Reinhard asked
"but the form has to know that it's
master detail doesn't it?"
Otherwise
"how does the form know that it can
insert a new item into the order?"
Neil said
"the list is either read only or read
write - if the list is added to then the business object
maintains referrential integrity when it updates the db"
.

Reinhard asked
"how does the form
know that i can add another item to the order - but i can not
add another customer? well i can _change_ the customer"
.
Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) said
"it
shouldn't display stuff to add a customer then ;) - or the gui
should be 'disabled' - forms has read-only widgets"
.
Reinhard suggested
"what you are
talking about means that we have some "array" type of
property"
. Daniel said
"which
in ODL would be a ref to a collection ;) - cause relationships
and attributes are the object "properties""
.

Neil emphasised that these were just his initial thoughts
"and i dont want to get in the way of
progress"
. Reinhard agreed - one of the themes of the
meeting had been to reduce discussion in future and implement
possible solutions -
"look where
we will have the _real_ problems - and improve that"
.
He felt that the discussion he and Jan had had about
the AppServer API in
Issue #53, Section #14
(26 Oct 2002: Performance and Overhead issues with AppServer)
was a good example of this -
"with
jforms siesel found out we have to change it to make performance
better - so we changed it - but if we hadn't done that prototype
implementation - we would never ever have seen the real
problem"
.

John Lenton (Chipaca) reported an unusual error message -
""You've got your bar in my foo! And
you've got your foo on my bar! Two great reams that ream well
together!""
-
"it's in
__singleQuery - I'm trying to massage it into being more
helpful - but I thought I'd check in here first; I can't be
the first guy to come accross this"
. Andrew Mitchell
(ajmitch) suggested adding some debug statements
"to print the traceback as
well"
John said
"the error is
"no results to fetch""
. Later, Jason Cater (jcater)
said
"if he's getting that message,
then he's calling a virtual function that should be
over-ridden by a subclass - /me fears they are messing around
with GDataObject internals that they shouldn't be -
kind of like me and electricity :)"
.

The next day, John mentioned the error messaga again.
James Thompson (jamest) said
"i
remember sticking in an error like that - but only when things
failed rather hideously"
. This had been removed from
recent CVS versions. He related a (possibly urban legend)
story about
"a coder that left
in a message to himself along the lines of "hey dumbass,
you shouldn't be able to do that" - (this was a
comercial product) - anyway it shipped with the error message
accidentaly left in - some lady hit it :) Can you imagine the
tech support call - "Yeah. Your program called me a dumbass."
- "Well....is it true?""
.

Later, John reported that the error
"seems
to ocurr even with some of the samples from cvs (this is with a
current gnue from your cvs)"
. Jason asked
"how are you triggering that message?
I've never seen it. is it a specific function you are calling that
triggers it - or a certain trigger"
? John said it was just
"when accessing the db - it's in pgsql's
extension triggers (or something like that"
). James said
this was an
"old error of mine -
meant really bad thing happened that should never have been
triggered - it's not in our cvs anymore IIRC"
. John said
he would check further. Jason said
"something
y'all have done is triggering it - I've never seen it triggered
before"
Unlike James, he though the error message was still
in the CVS code,
"but like you said, it's
in a place that is never triggered - if you can reproduce in one of
the samples, let us know - I've just never seen it - doesn't mean
it doesn't happen :)"

The next day, John reported
"I couldn't
reproduce the reaming error on a clean gnue pulled last night from
cvs with any of the samples in the forms/samples directory -
so you've fixed it between when we pulled your cvs and last night,
or we broke it in the same period (methinks the former)"
.

Further to
Issue #53, Section #30
(28 Oct 2002: Debian packages for GNUe into sid (unstable))
,
Derek Neighbors (derek) said
"i
finally sent files upstream to pysablot guy and asked him to
apply and make new tarball - hopefully he complies and you are
able to make official debs real soon now (tm)"
for
the Debian unstable distribution (sid).

Derek Neighbors (derek) needed to check copyright assignments
for GNUe on one of the FSF servers. Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch)
restored his account, setting up an ssh key for access,
discussing some of the principles of key signing.
Derek logged in, and said
"we have
a ton of assignments - i think we are half the copyright file
for"
the whole of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Jason Cater (jcater) said that GNUe Reports now supported
triggers, thanks to James Thompson (jamest) -
"0.1.0, here we come! /me isn't gonna
guarantee just *how* well they are supported, but the basics
are there"
. Also,
"I've started
on a pivot table/cross tabulation example in report's samples/
directory - per the mailing list thread - I have a couple of
bugs to get out"
.

Dmitry Sorokin (ra3vat) asked
"what
is the cause of cvs [checkout aborted]:
reading gnue/appserver/grpc/GEAS.grpc: Too many levels of symbolic
links - it was discussed earlier"
. Jason Cater said
"I have no idea what that's from -
I removed that file from my directory when it happened to me -
and updated again - but I have no idea what's causing it"
.
Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said
"derek
& i also got that error"
. Derek Neighbors (derek) said
he had asked savannah-hackers if they knew what the problem was in
Issue #52, Section #11
(19 Oct 2002: Problems updating GNUe CVS server)
,
but they had not been able to help. Derek also said that
Jan Ischebeck (siesel) had told him he knew what the problem was,
but he was not sure whether Jan had actually fixed it yet.
The issue was that
""GEAS.grpc" was
replaced by a symbolic link pointing to itself"
,
causing an infinite loop.
"The actual
CVS version of setup-cvs.py now provides both an upgrade path AND
removes the recursive symbolic link "GEAS.grpc"."

John Lenton (Chipaca) said he was trying to shift some code from a trigger
to a function - despite the function containing the same code as the
trigger, he could not get this to work.
"I'm
splitting the triggers into functions in a separate library because we're
using the same old triggers again and again and again"
.
James Thompson (jamest) asked
"have you tried
using our import libraries instead to store the trigger? - .gfd files
support trigger libraries - would that give you what you require ?"
.
John said
"it'd make it much easier - but I don't
think it'd make this fn work"
. James said he would look at John's
code -
"as I did lots of trigger crap last
night"
. John said he was using a version of Forms
that was older, as project papo's CVS was still a few weeks behind
GNUe's CVS.

Later, Jason Cater (jcater) asked
"stops
working in what way?"
John said it just
"silently doesn't do anything"
.
Later, he asked if there was any documentation for the form libraries
James had mentioned -
"what I understood was
that there was a general way of adding functionality to forms without
having to import the library in every trigger, for example - maybe I
understood too much"
. Jason said
"you
can globally import files once on an On-Startup trigger - then it's
available to every trigger in the form"
, giving an example -
this
"works for variables too"
. This
was in the latest CVS version -
"it's
relatively new"
.

John got an up-to-date CVS copy, and reported that
Forms now generated a segmentation fault.
James asked whether this was
"an
on-startup in GFTrigger.py?"
He explained
"GFTrigger.py died last nite in
the cvs tree - all trigger code is in common now"
.

Some days later, James said the way that trigger libraries
worked by creating
"a trigger lib
file"
containing the code for the triggers, then in the
normal GNUe Forms Definition (.gfd) file, you would use an
import-trigger tab, with attributes library="filename" and
name="triggername". You could then refer to the trigger as
if it had been defined locally. He was
"working on the library system
now"
-
"/me is altering the
parser system to allow other gnue apps to do imports - the current
cvs is forms only wrt imports - i should have any gnue apps able
to do them"
soon.

Peter Sullivan (psu) noted that the first anniversary issue
of Kernel Cousins GNUe
"has more
words than issue 1 had bytes..."
Jason Cater (jcater)
said
"good job - pretty soon, you might
have to learn to delegate :)"
Peter said that
"group authorship is a distinct
possibility"
. He felt that Kernel Cousins
"might be a good way for non-coders
to get involved - without having to dig into the deeper recesses
of the dcoumentation or the website (our other two big non-coding
TODOs). Main problem is how I "tweak" the mechanisms of
group-authoring a KC to fit IRC as the way the other lists work
is that people claim "threads" via a central mailing list once
they're finished - IRC != threads"
He would
"not want people to divert coding time
to write KCs - as that rather misses the point"
.

Nicholas Lee (esands) asked about multi-currency General
Ledger functionality. Peter Sullivan (psu) said
"you decide on a base currency -
then wherever you have an "amount" field normally -
you have 3 - base amount, foreign amount, and foreign currency.
Foreign currency AP & AR are the real funsters -
as you have to hack gain/loss on settlement of open transactions.
e.g. raise AR invoice for USD 100 ( = GBP 64) -
eventually you get paid USD 100, but by then it is GBP 63 -
so you have to write off the missing GBP 1 as a forex loss"
.
Nick Rusnov (nickr) suggested
"see, if
we had One World Currency we wouldn't have this problem"
.
Jason Cater (jcater) suggested
"I vote on
donuts - of course, currency that can spoil might make saving
interesting :)"
.

The next day, Nicholas said
"For reconcilations
I assume most multi-currency GLs keep a seperate ledger of (rate, amount)
figures. What's the general practice for pricing a currency account on a
given balance date? given that the base currency figure in that account
represents and average of the prior exchanges, but the rate to realise the
monies on a balance rate might result in a fx loss or gain."
Peter, said
"To me, the key principle is that you
define a base currency - and then all transactions in GL store amount in base
currency, amount in foreign currency, name of foreign currency. To get "true"
trial balance you do select sum (base_amt) from balances ;"
Nicholas said
"That's need for tax purposes and need
for in order to rationalise transactions within the GL. From a business
management point of view though you need reconcile transactions and deal
with making profit over multiple currencies"
Peter felt
"only if that's useful management information to
you - I could imagine a biz not caring how much profit they made in Aussie
dollars, just how much they made on product category X"
.

Nicholas asked
"What's the general rule of thumb
in the UK regarding balance date base currency valutions of a foreign bank
account?"
Peter disclaimed
"I'm not an
expert on forex, but I believe this is where unrealised gain/loss on forex
comes in"
-
"for balance sheet purposes
you convert at prevailing exchnage rate at 31st Decembefr - The difference
between this and what the amount in your books is constitues (IIRC) the
unrelised gain or loss"
. He gave a simple example of an unrealised
gain. The
"main issue (i am not a lawyer,
especially a tax lawyer) is how taxman wants you to treat this"
.

Nicholas asked what exchange rate to use -
"the given rate on that day? or by the internal
rate of sumif(GBP)/sumif(USD)"
? Peter said
"I would always go far a "daily" rate in this
day and age - with computers to do the work for us - monthly rates are less
accurate - taxman might have a view too"
. Nicholas said
"I'll have to think how to use that in the context
of hedging your transactions."
Peter said
"hedging if used properly is just a way of
realising the potential gain/loss - i.e. take a forward position for when
you expect the transaction to settle (for an invoice, typically 30
days)"
. Nicholas said
"Depends on the terms,
for instance many of our transactions are 90 day - foreign exchanges ones
that is"
.

Nicholas asked
"I assume a form of that triple
is used"
in the Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable ledgers
as well. Peter agreed -
"once the transaction
is settled (i.e. paid) you'd have a trigger to work out the *realised*
gain/loss and post that right away"
. Nicholas said
"Actually the commerical system we use, generates
the variances both on posting (month end) and payment"
.

Reinhard Müller (reinhard) noted that, in Austria and Germany,
"for the balance, you may not consider unrealized
forex gains - and you _have_to_ consider unrealized forex losses -
so you always have to use the "worst case" in the balance"
.
Nicholas was surprised
"they don't try get more
tax by requiring realisation of gains though. Must be nicer now you have
the euro."
Reinhard said the aim was to ensure
"that the balance shouldn't look better
than it really should be"
. Nicholas said
"Doesn't that depend on your point of view?
Although the balance in both currencies in the balance sheet is an average
of past transactions. At given moment it can be realised into the base
currency. All past rates are in the past and all future rates unknown.
Thus there is no true better or worse. Still I agree its better just
realising fx losses. Otherwise it could cause undue hardship on a businesses
cashflow."
Reinhard agreed, but said
"with the worst case view it's shure the
balance doesn't look better than the real future outcome will be -
it might probably look worse - but that's actually the point of a worst
case view :)"
.

Charles Rouzer (Mr_You) asked
"how can
you do secure db connections"
with GNUe?
Derek Neighbors (derek) said
"we have full security wrapper
now - i.e. plugin - that you can use kerberos, pam, etc"
.
"currently we use ssh"
-
"so the client is on my machine i
ssh tunnel port 5342 to the internet machine postgres is
on"
. Charles asked how this would work with client PCs
running Microsoft Windows. Derek said they could use
"putty"
which was a free
ssh client written native for Win32 - cygwin was not needed.
"we will likely add this as a plugin
to the framework - so it will create tunnels everything on fly
for you"
.
"the idea would be
to have this wizard be in the framework and then execute the script
on demand - instead of have to run externally"
.
Charles noted
"you guys run GNUe
locally.. but there are TONS of small business people that would
rather run their small biz software remotely and not worry about a
server or anything.. its harder to sell a "hacked" solution like
ssh tunnel until its seamlessly integrated..."
Calum Morrell (drochaid) asked
"err, how
is an ssh tunnel "hacked" in any sense? it's a fairly standard
security consideration"
. Charles said
"my definition of "hacked" in this case
means.. to the end user (newbie).. it may seem "hacked together"
for them.. if they have to install more than one package and
configure this and that.. rather than just configuring a GNUe Forms
client."
Derek said
"the ssh
stuff would be IN the client - i.e. to a lay person it woudl be
click button enter username and passowrd - nothing more nothing
less"
. Even now,
"it is install
gnue install putty and click such and such to configure remote server
done"
-
"if you were 'deploying'
you could actually precreate the script - and they wouldnt do
anything but connect"
.

Calum Morrell (drochaid) asked
"what's
the documentation side of GNUe doing recently?"
Charles Rouzer (Mr_You) said
"jason has a nice
developer
doc - its a doc for wannabe GNUe Application
Developers ;-) like me ;-) - not python coders."
Derek Neighbors (derek) said
"its in
jasons home directory i think - as its a work in progress"

The next day, Jason Cater (jcater) asked
"have
you given any thought on how to handle our new GNUe/Small Business
Edition"
for the website.
"I
think derek and I were leaning towards keeping it as GNUe
(and so having it be a part of GNUe's website, somehow) -
we just wanted a separate CVS tree"
. Peter said
"I think I would just add gnue-sb to
the "Applications" section of the site"
, noting that
registering the project in CVS at savannah, the FSF's free
equivalent to sourceforge, would automatically create a web
page for the project on the www.gnu.org website. Jason said
"we are **strongly** considering going
to this gnue-??? model for all our gnue stuff"
with
seperate CVS repositories for
"gnue-forms,
gnue-reports, etc"
. Peter said this
"gives us an auto structure for the
web site too - as each gnue-foo will have its own mini site on
www.gnu.org - with /software/gnue/ as the official entry
point"
. Jason said
"actually,
that is one of our hangups - as we were expecting it to be harder
to do the website :)"
However,
"this would let gnue.org be more of a
community site like derek's always clamoring for - as we would
always have easily accessible tool sites"
Peter said
"well, www.gnuenterprise.org already
has things that we wouldn't ever put on www.gnu.org - e.g. the
irc logs"
.

Calum asked whether the website should
"give documentation a much more prominent
position?"
Peter said
"Documentation
is a funny one - as we only have 1 docs page at the moment - but there
are at least 3 levels - a) end user docs, b) application developer
docs (people designing apps with gnue), c) GNUe developer docs"
.
Calum said
"I always find it's one of the
most important link .. and just now it's the 2nd last item on the
menu, or into community and the 2nd last item, there"
- he
"like to see "GNUe Docs" beside "GNUe
Community" in the top header"
. Peter said that
"Short term, I may as well go back to the
old "fudge" - which is to have Docs listed in both Project
(loghically just under "Downloads") - and also in Community as
well"
until there were enough documents of different types to
warrant two pages. Calum suggested adding another major category
down the left hand side for Documentation, and adding a tab across
the top. Peter noted that the tabs across the top related to the
three bullet points on the Home Page about "What is GNUe?" -
Tools, Applications and Community, but he supposed he could
"say that GNue was 4 things, one of which
is a repository of docs"
.

Jason was not keen on
"another tab across
the top - I think we have about as many tabs as we can realistically
put there"
. Instead,
"I think each
tab deserve's its own doc"
page -
"if
we have a centralized doc page I think it's going to be so
confusing"
. Calum felt
"if someone
isn't sure which category a doc is likely to be in, could piss them
off trying to find it"
. Jason outlined how his idea would
work -
"the Forms/ page would still list
all the form-related docs - but from the main menu, you could
quickly get to all tool-related docs too"
.

Jason said
"one of the things we've been
emphasizing over the last month or so is that the tools get lost in
the apps - so we're trying to point out that GNue is 3 projects in one.
I just think the documentation should follow in that focus as well -
and I'm talking at a minimum here"
. Calum said
"whereas I would always classify documention
as a separate project, as without really good docs, the tools/apps
are useless to the less than technical users"
. Peter felt
"we need a lot more docs before any of
this matters - but that will come"
.

David Sugar (dyfet) said
"we are close
to a 1.1 release in bayonne"
, the GNU telephony software
project. Derek Neighbors (derek) needed to
"get a frelling copy of bayonne
working - i just got a new phone that does AOL"
Instant
Messaging (IM)
"and im enamored -
/me is drooling over possibilities"
. David said
"actually I have considered adding
im support to Bayonne....so it can send sms messages and
popups with incoming call info"
-
"well, it could though something like
jabber, i suppose, where there are appropriate im/sms gateways.
thats why i want to build an im module in bayonne"
.

Derek said
"hmm it does sms - grr
i REALLY need to get a hold of it. the biggest hold up (i know you
guys hate hearing this) is it needs to support normal modems -
currently the hardware cost is way too high barrier to entry for
'free software' developers"
. David said
"free is not free as in price :)"
.
Derek said
"i know freedom is
expensive - just free software developers unless commissioned
directly to install phone software can not afford 500+ for a
professional phone card. i think if it ran on modems you would
have a huge user base - i know for myself i would be running at
home"
. David said
"I would like
to get a modem version running - there even is a start of a
voicemodem driver, but nobody has been working on it"
.

Derek said
"i have 3 clients that
are considering buying hardware - but its hard for me to give
strong recommendation when i havent driven it myself"
.
He had been working with some Bayonne people to get it set up
for a client
"so that i can get a
bayonne install and get an idea for capabilities - and MOST
importantly start writing applications to it :)"
.
David agreed -
"and most important, I
think, writing applications that integrate into/relate to gnue
apps...."
.

Jason Cater (jcater) noted that Monte Lin
"who uses the debian packages has sent
in a patch which fixes the Property Inspector issue :) :) :)
- the one we've been trying to figure out for a year now - and
it's a one-liner"
. Calum Morrell (drochaid) asked
"is that the "can't edit field with
scroll bars present" one?"
as mentioned in several
previous threads.
Peter Sullivan (psu) said
"this is
the great thing about free software - users who fix their own
bugs - gotta love 'em"
. Jason noted that he had
previously claimed this
"was a WX bug,
and not a GNUe bug"
. Peter suggested several
possible lines of defence for Jason - either
"the wx docs weren;t clear"
,
"no-one else noticed it either"
or
"derek told me to do it that way
;-)"
.

Anthony Liguori (aliguori)
"had
a quick question about the security adapter layer... noticed that ldap
and active directory were connected to it (presumably, example security
plugins) - ldap doesn't seem like nearly enough for enterprise security
though (and security is a huge part of the app server) so i was
wondering if this project is going to have a huge dependecy on active
directory? or are there plans to work on an enterprise security
layer?"
Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said GNUe
"probably plans to work on something - i very
much doubt that there'd be an AD dependency :)"
.

Anthony asked
"is this the same
app server that the dotGNU project refers too?"
-
"the one that supposed to support both
j2ee and clr"
architectures. Andrew said not -
"the GNUe appserver is written in
python"
, which was
"a programming
language - we build the architecture :)"
. Jason Cater (jcater)
explained
"our main goal with gnue appserver
is centralizing business application rules - business logic, if you
will"
-
"note that we aren't building
a generic, all purpose application server"
. Derek pointed to
his notes
from a previous meeting -
"you will notice
goal number one precludes use of j2ee and/or .NET"
.

Anthony surmised
"it seems that
the GNUe app server is based on RPC, LDAP, and Python.
Seems a bit like Active Directory..."
Derek disagreed -
if you had to compare GNUe AppServer to any Microsoft product,
the closest was probably Microsoft Transaction Server,
"and even there its a bad
analogy"
.

Derek said that, as of time of writing, GNUe and DotGNU were
two very different projects, but there had been discussions on
working together in two areas. The first was GNU-RPC -
"also there
was talk by dotGNU folks to look at appserver as something they
are interested in"
as a basis for their own web-based
application server. Andrew, as
"the
main person who has feet in both projects"
, said that
"the gnu-rpc implementation will be
getting worked on next week"
-
"and appserver will be used"
by DotGNU
" where it
suits - if"
GNUe's
"appserver
is not suitable for more generic tasks, then we'll sort something
else out :)"
. He explained
"gnu-rpc
is an abstraction layer to allow multiple transports to be
used"
(SOAP, CORBA and XML-RPC) - Derek explained
"think perl-dbi only for rpc
mechanisms - again its written in python"
. Andrew
said he was planning to write a version of GNU-RPC in C# for
DotGNU. Derek said that
"jcater is one
that wrote gnu rpc"
for GNUe, with the fine-tuning
done by Jan Ischebeck (siesel).

James Thompson (jamest) was
"testing
a fix for the wx splashscreen timeout bad window error"
,
as discussed in Issue #53, Section #8
(24 Oct 2002: Problems with Forms splashscreen)
,
"and think he figured it out - but I
need to really load this machine down to test properly"
.
Later, Dmitry Sorokin (ra3vat) asked
"does
navigator work?"
- he was getting an
"AttributeError: GFUserInterface instance
has no attribute 'splash'"
. James said helpfully
"I think the answer to your question is
"yes, navigator is broken" :)"
. He
"had two options here - 1 ) keep the
splash on top for 3 seconds - 2 ) drop the splashscren the moment
the form was ready for processing - it's 1 line of code either way.
I did 1 as on a fast system the splashscreen wouldn't have been up
any time at all - but what would peopler prefer"
? Jason
Cater (jcater) pointed out that
"navigator
is supposed to always suppress the splash"
, but in Forms, he
would prefer the
"3 sec"
option.

Jeff Bailey (jbailey) asked whether GNUe could be used
"for a simple PO system. I think it's
all good for that, yes? Like it's stable, generally won't eat
data and all that? Backend would presummably one of our Oracle
DBs or mysql or something like that. Clients are all
win32."
Jason Cater (jcater) said
"haven't had it eat data yet :) -
I think it'll be fine - as long as you don't have a user
named"
Derek Neighbors -
"if
that's the case, everything seems to fall apart"
.
Derek (revDeke) defended himself -
"im not sure its EVER eaten my
data - its not accepted it before"
with some of the more
unstable CVS versions
"but never
eaten it"
. Jeff asked how the screens were accessed.
Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said
"screens are either supplied
locally, or can be grabbed over http"
. Derek
clarified
"they can be grabbed over
any transport supported by python - http/https/ftp/etc"
,
using python's urlOpen() function or equivalent.

John Lenton (Chipaca) asked
"is
there a way to abort a page switch? i.e. the guy clicked on
a different page but he left this one in an illegal state"
.
Jason Cater (jcater) said
"you
could do a form.setFocus(some widget on the bad
page)"
. John reported
"form.
setFocus(widget) changes the focus back to the page, but
it then changes back to the page the user clicked on -
i.e. with debug-level set to 5 I get one "changing focus"
when I clicked on the page tag, and two when I press
"Cancel""
. He asked
"shouldn't
the pre-focusout trigger get called *before* the actual switch
of focus?"
James Thompson (jamest) agreed.

John asked how to cancel a page flip,
"without writing one trigger per
page"
. This would allow the form to check user input
amd
"go back to the page the user was
on if she forgot to fill something in"
. Jason Cater
(jcater) said
"the goal was to allow
triggers to return a true or false based on success/failure
- so if a failure was returned everything stops"
.
John said
"yeah, but the page has
already changed, even"
at the point the pre-focusout
trigger was called. Jason said
"then
that's a bug w/page changing"
. John expressed some
frustration with the wxpython GUI toolkit, but recognised
why GNUe used it, as it allowed cross-platform GUI so easily.
"the worst bug is the
widget-seems-to-get-focus-but-doesn't - that confuses the
hell out of people"
. This was
"the one where you point at
an entry but just on the border so the cursor isn't acutally
I-shaped, click, and the | cursor appears in the entry, but
the focus isn't there - it's amazingly simple to trigger
that one by accident"
. Jason said he had never
seen this.

James Thompson (jamest) said
"for
all the appserver developers in the house - jcater and myself
are wanting to do a normal release of common, forms, reports, designer
- then do what I've been calling a spitshine release at (0.5.0).
meaning the next release is 0.4.1 - then 0.5.0 comes out with no
new functionality - (I'm talking common version numbers btw) -
we've instead focus on code cleanup, docs, bugfixes"
-
"0.4.1 would be basically cvs that we
have now"
. However,
"how would
this effect appserver? do we need to hold off on a common freeze
for a while to get some features needed in there"
?
Reinhard Müller (reinhard) felt
"it
would be better to do both 0.4.1 _and_ 0.5.0 of common
_before_ "
the Application Server team started "breakage"
by adding the features they needed to Common.
"However it would be good to ask"
Jan Ischebeck (siesel)
"too -
because he's exactly the one that can answer this question -
he always was the personified interface between common and appserver
:) - and at our meeting he talked about some points he wants to
change in common - however i didn't get the feeling that they were
_urgent_"
. James said
"ok, the
main reason I ask is we don't want the appserver needs to not get
met - and I'd hate to try and say "no new features" if it hurts
appserver. I'd rather do a series of 0.4.x releases to get what
you require in there first - we've kind of promised ourselves no
common|forms|designer 0.5.0 without good docs. Well, one thing that
I hope to get into 0.4.1 is autodoc support for triggers in the base
apps - so that it'll be easier to create them for 0.5.0 :) autodoc
= our command line interface to dump various info about things like
parameters"
.

Jeff Bailey (jbailey) started to re-build the Debian packages for
GNUe, so that he could get them into sid (the Debian unstable
distribution. Derek Neighbors (derek) asked
"can you commit them to cvs"
?
Jeff suggested some possible changes to the CVS structure to make
this easier -
"The way I do the packaging is
that the upstream source is just a tarball sitting in the deb.
That way upgrades are mostly just replacing the tarball.
I will cheerfully keep that in cvs if you'd like - that would be easy
enough - but I'd make a new toplevel "packaging/debian/PACKAGENAME/"
probably..."
Jason wondered if his original Debian packages
should have been marked as for woody (as of time of writing, the
Debian stable distribution),
"as they rely
on python 2.1 stuff"
. Jeff found and Jason fixed various
bugs and other oddities in CVS (such as image files that had the
executable flag set). Jeff explained
"I'm
taking a tarball of the CVS tree and stuffing it into my packaging.
Which is mostly jcaters packaging."
Jason said
"I actually thought you weren't supposed
to package against a cvs tree directly - that's why I worked from
the source tarball"
of the 0.4.0 releases. Jeff said
"It depends on the maintainer. I only
package against CVS when I'm friends with upstream."
Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said it depended
"and what level of masochism they
like - i package from cvs for DotGNU stuff - because i am part of
upstream :)"
.

Jeff finished packaging GNUe Common, and asked
"Why did you call the package
gnue-forms-wxgtk instead of just gnue-forms?"
Andrew
said there were other Forms clients available, including
php. Jason added
"there's also a
gnue-forms-curses and a gnue-forms-gtk2"
which they
would probably look to do Debian packages for once they were
a bit more mature.
"there probably
should be a gnue-forms-base or such - as a good chunk of the
code is the same"
. James Thompson (jamest) agreed -
"then driver .debs"
for
each seperate User Interface (UI).

Jeff could not find the man files for Forms in CVS. Jason
explained
"that's created dynamically
when we package up a tarball"
, but could also be
generated on demand with the --generate-man-page flag.
James noted that the man pages were not
"100% complete"
.
Jeff said
"Even if they're partially
complete that's fine. The GNU project doesn't support man pages,
right? =) So having a partial one, and a note to look at the
texinfo documentation is usually fine."
Jason said
"as soon as I learn texinfo we'll hve
a --generate-texinfo-page :)"
flag as well.

Testing the packages, Jason noted
"it runs - but my intro.gfd shows no
labels - but running against my latest cvs copy, they do
show."
"I don't see how this
could have *anything* to do with debs - but its odd"
.
Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said
"don't
try apt-get install gnue-forms gnue-designer - unless you want
the 0.1.1 version :)"
-
"does gnue-forms-wxgtk replace
gnue-forms?"
Jeff said
"replace,
conflicts, yes."
. Andrew said
"gnue-appserver had best replace
geas"
. Jeff asked
"Is there any
value in doing appserver yet, or should it wait?"
If
the only reason was to replace the old GEAS (GNUe Application
Server) package, he could
"just file a
bug and have it removed."

Later, he announced
"gnue-common,
gnue-forms, and gnue-designer were all ACCEPTED into
Debian as of about 30 minutes ago. They'll be in sid tommorow.
The geas update will probably wait until next week."

The next day, Jeff asked
"Does
appserver actually do anything yet?"
Reinhard Müller
(reinhard) said
"it passes all
data requests through to the database - and has a very very
basic function for calling methods"
. Jeff said
"Okay, cool. I just want to make sure
if I go throught he effort of packaging it that it's not a
waste of time."
Reinhard said
"not
sure about that - it does nothing "useful" now - it's more like
an empty box that can be filled afterwards - the only reason i
see it would make sense to package it is for "marketing"
reasons"
. Jeff agreed -
"I'm not
so concerned about the usefulness. I just want it to somewhat
work as advertised."

It was asked if there was a php Forms client. Jan Ischebeck
(siesel) said there was,
"but not
very stable at the moment."
. Jason Cater (jcater)
sighed
"I guess I'll never understand
this web-based frenzy"
. Jeff Bailey (jbailey) said
"Zero footprint clients save us a
pile of cash here."
Jason said that was different -
"I love the thrill of 0 footprint
too"
-
"I squeal like a stuck
hog"
. Jeff mused
"I wonder
sometimes if I'm happiest having never met any of you.
=)"
James Thompson (jamest) said
"no need to wonder, you
are"
.

Derek Neighbors (derek) said
"there is no such thing as zero
footprint client - web apps need a broswer ive yet to find one
that is ZERO footprint - to top that off they are all
different - and EVERY corporate one we have looked into
MANDATED"
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or
higher. He was
"thinking at some
point of making a 'wrapper' for forms so its a plugin -
so you can run forms like 'applets' i.e. you go to a url that
uses forms - and it tells you to get gnue plugin v0.4.1
- you go and grab that and voila now forms works. The sad
thing is it will quell the 'web freaks' - but in essence it
is nothing more than normal forms wrapped"
.

Jason Cater (jcater) explained that
"my problem with roadmaps is - it doesn't
define where we're going - it defines what others expect me to
do"
. Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said
"there are others who can help!"
but Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) said
"nah,
no one is worthy of hacking jcater's code"
. Jason said
"I welcome help - and I'd like to take this
opportunity to thank those who have started coding more and
more"
, including Bajusz Tamás (btami), Andrew,
Jan Ischebeck (siesel), the members of project Papo -
"I *know* I missed someone... so don't take
it personally"
. James Thompson (jamest) sniffed
"now we know how he feels about my
code"
. Jason said
"you haven't
started coding more and more - you've always coded"
.

Jeff Bailey (jbailey) said
"The
version number in Debian is going to be 20021105."
Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) was not keen on this,
"unless this is the
2million, 21 thousand, and fifth debian revision :)"
.
Jason explained that, for help desk purposes, the About
box in the CVS version of Forms said it was 0.4.1a
("a" for "alpha") -
"but it will
become 0.4.1 when released"
. It was noted that
Debian - and other packaging systems - would regard
0.4.1a as a later version than 0.4.1. Jason said that
it was not really possible to change this before
0.4.1 was released - James Thompson (jamest)
suggested going straight to 0.4.2.

Derek Neighbors (derek) said the project
"might as well release 0.5.0
- we have no method right now (seriously) - other than
chaos - its completely abitrary"
.
"there is no 'roadmap' that
states what release is what - so there is no control -
at which point who cares if its 0.4.1 or 0.5.0 (independent
of the alpha question) - there is nothing stating what
features will be in what releases - so USERS have no idea
until something is released what is what"
. Jason said
"we have our internal markers -
a lot is dependent on whether common's API changed -
if common's API is vastly different, it has to be a major
point release"
. Derek said
"until now its been no big deal -
as we didnt have mass of other developers - and we didnt have
production users"
. Jason said
"it's not perfect, nor well planned
- but it's not arbitrary"
.

Derek said
"we need to very
soon get to the point where we really maintain 2 releases -
so that someone on an old release can expect to get their bugs
fixed - but not expect a bunch of expiremental features or
major breakage"
. James said
"i thought someone was going to
backport patches if we tagged cvs?"
Derek said
"that would be me -
my problem is cvs commits are going like mad -
but the cvs commit messages frankly suck - and there is no
roadmap or system used to manage what should be backported.
My proposal is we have a strict feature roadmap for the new
releases and only if some feature is minor in nature does it
get backported"
.

James said
"i can't see that
working with free labor"
. Derek emphasised
"i never said 'put dates on
features'"
. James explained
"what I'm saying is that like
tonight - i finally got sick of the no query by detail -
so I'm fixing it. This isn't on any roadmap - other than
I'm sick of it"
. Derek said he was
"not saying that roadmaps cant
change"
- the importance of the roadmap was that it
provided a place to park feature requests for the future
rather than the next immediate release -
"at some point one has to say
this road is closed"
- creeping featurism had been
had been a factor in the length of time taken over the
last two GNUe releases. This had affected GNUe's relationship
with other projects, including papo.

Also, with a roadmap, it would be possible to split
changes in CVS head between bug fixes to existing features
(which would get ported back to interim 'stable' releases)
and new features which belonged only in the new release.
James said
"nothing prevents that
today however the API is constatnly in flux, we are a 0.5.0
project - I can see something stable as we approach
1.0"
. Derek said
"as we
get more developers and more solid releases it will be
mandatory to avoid chaos"
.

James said
"well, another way
to approach this problem that i would prefer - an (semi-)
automated testing framework"
. Jason said
"I would too - and I've BEGGED people
to do it"
. Derek agreed
"certainly that is necessary to
help speed moving a release out the door - as thats one thing
that has made the process difficult - feature freeze is called -
and it takes too long to test to point where its too tempting
to add new features in"
. Jason noted that
Jan Ischebeck (siesel)
"has even taken
the initiative to start one in samples/testcases - but I don't
see testcases flowing in"
. James said he had
"been adding to it for what I'm
working on - but it's not standardized yet - was hoping to make
it part of the 0.5.0 cleanup release"
. Daniel Baumann
(chillywilly) noted
"there's different
types of testing - black-box, white box, etc. - white box
requires good knowledge of the code that is being tested -
the *internals* of it - there's probably only 3 ppl right now
that fit this description, imho - with perhaps a couple that
have a decent understanding"
. James explained
"i wanted to make a gnue navigator
thing - with various forms that had pages lableed step 1 2 3 4
- and a final pass/fail step"
. Daniel said
"basically we need a testing team
and/or go intoa testing mode"
. James felt that
"anything is better than what we have
now - which IIRC was jcater saying "prereleases is here please
test" - then have people test after the final release"
.

Daniel said
"soem ppl can't code
without some structure as they like to see down the "road"
;)"
Derek said
"the people
closest to gnue have the roadmap in their head - and cant see
why anyone is frustrated that there is no structure - because
when you are close to it, there appears to be structure (and
there is) - just its not in a format that can be well
shared"
. He was
"not so
much requesting things be radically different than they are
now, just that they be better presented to the public"
.
Jason, referring back to
Issue #52, Section #7
(19 Oct 2002: Frustrations with Release Process)
,
said
"we are already stretched pretty
thin - the few of us"
. He felt it was unfair to
suggest that the core developers were not responsive to end-user
needs -
"I've spent a HELL of a lot of
time on the developer's guide"
, which he personally had
no need for. Derek said
"im willing
to write up roadmaps and maintain a back branch -
but not if i have to swim against the river to do it -
i.e. if you and jamest loathe the idea of roadmaps i woudl rather
not try to document whats in your heads for the public :)"
.
Jason alsoo objected
"you make it sound
like we just only add new features and never look back - jamest
and I take a release every so often - and do NOTHING but cleanup
and profiling"
, as planned for the 0.5.0 release.
Derek said
"actually my complaint
is you guys do far too much clean up :) - and my hope is to get
to a point where others can 'clean up some' and you guys can add
new cool stuff"
. Jason agreed, but said
"I would also like some donuts - but I
don't have any - so it won't happen"
without extra
volunteers. He felt over-managed on the project. Daniel
said
"I think all FS projects could use
a bit of management, however, I don't think they need "managers"
;)"
. Matt Rice (ratmice) suggested
"I think we need the man with the yellow
hat from curious george books"
.

Ariel Calò (ariel_) said
"i've seen the
new documentation of schema (gsd) - we have a type 'key' (old a
uto) that is translated to a db specific type, may be serial,
int4 or whatsoever. Now a primary key has 2 functions: 1) enforce
uniqueness of rows - 2) be referenced by foreign keys of other
databases. Suppose i have a table with a field that references
the primary key of another table - i want that field to have the
same type of the pk in the other table. If i declare it of type
key may be this is translated to serial (that i don't want since
it is only a foreign key). i cannot declare it int4 (or similar)
since i don't know how key is translated. i think a solution is
another type fkey that is automatically translated by the specific
driver to whatever is appropriate for the specific db
backend"
. Jason Cater (jcater) pointed out that
"key != serial - there should be an
auto="" that makes it serial. So in the primary table you might
have mykey --> type="key" auto="y" - then in the referencing table
pointerToKey --> type="key""
.

Bajusz Tamás (btami) reported a bug with GNUe Forms on
Microsoft Windows 32 -
"with tabbed
forms - when changing pages with mouse - after that going to
the next record - the "content" doesn't refresh"
.
He pointed to the area of the code which would mean that
"changing tabs with mouse will be
OK - but PgDn/PgUp wrong - but it's only on win32 IIRC"
.
James Thompson (jamest) suggested a possible work-around, but
said he
"has no working win32 boxes
handy"
to test this himself. Bajusz said
"i feel nobody likes to fix win32 bugs
here :)"
James said
"i started
hammering thru the dcl bugs last nite - so if they are in there
I'll make as attempt to fix them"
. Jason Cater (jcater)
explained
"it's not so much we like to
fix non-Win32 bugs vs Win32 - it's that we don;t have win32
machines handy :("
Bajusz said
"i think fixing win32 bugs is
important, cose most of GNUe users will use win clients
- while M$ is so strong in offices"
.

Jan Ischebeck (siesel) asked
"does
anyone of you have an urgent need for integrator?"
Jason Cater (jcater) said
"relatively
so"
- he had
"already started on
it - I think my latest stuff is in cvs"
. He added
"one of the biggest things I'll need to
do next (That I haven't even started on) is a CSV / Flatfile
dbdriver - even a simplistic one - as my plans for integrator
are primarily mapping from source datasources to destination
datasources"
. He explained
"this
isn't actually to run apps against - I need to be able to load
CVS files into my database and dump them from my database"
.
He
"certainly wouldn't plan on running
forms against a CSV file, although it would be possible I
suppose.... :)"
Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said
"i can try & start on one
tomorrow if you'd like, not sure how you'd declare field names
& stuff like that tho - as it would be useful for me as
well"
. Jason said
"that's part
of my hangup - I'm wondering about having a child node of
datasource"
, where the flat file defintion would be
included as part of the datasource definition -
"but am not sure the best
approach"
. Andrew suggested
"for something quick & dirty,
just name them 'column1' or 'field2', etc - would allow for
conversion"
. Jan said
"if
the flatfile dbdriver is just used for loading csv into
integrator, why should we define special names for the
fields - wouldn't a "field_1", "field_2" etc. be
enought?"
Jason said
"I
don't think it will necessarily be 1 way - but that's fine
too - field_1 would work both ways"
. Andrew said
"some CSV files may have
headers iirc"
. Jason said
"most
loading software I see have a "skipFirstRow" option"
.
Andrew said
"yep - that first row
may contain field names if you're lucky"
. Jan
"would like to put all that stuff
(skipFirstRow, delimiter....) into the connection.conf
file"
. Both Jason and Andrew were keen on this.
Jan said
"what about writing? Should
read+write access be supported. (that would mean to rewrite
the file after a COMMIT)"
. Jason said
"I can see two options 1.
skipFirstRow=0|1 or 2. useHeadersAsFields or soemthing
like that - (they don't have to be exclusive)"
-
"actually, skiprows shouldn't be
boolean - it should be an integer - as I've gotten some funky
stuff frm vendors before - esp. when they aren't using a
real application but are instead doing in a spreadsheet and
saving as csv"
. Jan suggested
"what about
"firstRow=skip|fieldnames|data""
- Jason added
"and default to "data" ?"

Jan noted
"IMHO the Integrator
Proposal speaks of converting data from a datasource into
XML, move it into a RULE ENGINE and export the XML into a
datasource again. the RULE ENGINE is quite similar to a
XSLT tranformation for me. So I would like to add a module,
which does kind of XSLT transformations, but is written in
python, to common."
Jeff Bailey (jbailey) asked
"What's wrong with regular XSLT?
Use an XSLT namespace.... Like, if it's presenting as XML,
you could just use <xsl:*> tags to embed commands
in."
Jan said
"I would
just like to fake XML to the RULE ENGINE, because I don't
think that it is good to convert huge database tables to
XML just for fun."
Jason said
"reports is a rule engine"
.
Jan asked
"so you would recommend
to take code from reports to write integrator?"
Jeff suggested, rather than re-use code from reports,
Jan should
"move code into common
and use in both reports and"
integrator.

Later, Derek Neighbors (derek) said
"i personally wouldnt make it as
complex as is talked about (well to a degree) - as i think
there is a difference between 'integrator' and 'csv
driver'"
.

Jeff Bailey (jbailey) noted that the gcc (GNU C Compiler)
project's mailing list
"seem to indicate
that folks there want to switch from Gnats to Bugzilla"
as their bug-tracking system.
"People
(and by this, I generally mean Derek) who would prefer that they
use DCL should probably speak up."
Derek Neighbors
(derek) admitted
"im a dcl evangelizer
- BUT its more 'work order' oriented than software bug oriented -
i.e. there are several features missing that would make it
better"
specifically for bug tracking -
"but i think it does pretty darn
good"
. He felt that
"with most
software you hope you are doing more new work than fixing bugs -
and i think DCL is FAR superior in task management - but weaker
in bug management (though it does an ok job of this). If
'versioning' stuff was beefed up a bit it would be pretty good -
bugzilla is great for version management, but its really bad for
end users to deal with (imho) i.e. its daunting to deal with
unless you use it religiously"
. Jeff said
"I know several people with the same
complaint."